


Standard Issue

by sakurazawa



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-01-05
Updated: 2016-01-07
Packaged: 2018-05-11 23:05:16
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,630
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5645107
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sakurazawa/pseuds/sakurazawa
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Some months after the destruction of Starkiller base, Rey and Poe find themselves on a secret mission to the Hapes Cluster in search of a reported First Order munitions facility.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Shaking Stars

Rey’s piloting skills came naturally these days, even more naturally when she remembered Luke’s lessons. The world around her, the ship’s controls in her hands, and the energy buzzing through it all like particles of light–these made up the fabric of her universe in those moments.

Poe Dameron did his best to throw a Harris wrench into her carefully-learned Jedi calm.

He had very nearly lost her seven times in the Hapes Cluster’s Transitory Mists, insisting on short hyperspace jumps to confuse Consortium scanners. Her navigation console–itself confused by the famous ionized clouds–gave her conflicting coordinates every time.

Still, she managed it. Somehow. Without flying into one of the several hundred stars that made up the xenophobic cluster.

653-Prime, one of the only life-supporting satellites on a cold dwarf star, was so inconsequential as to have no more than a number and designation. It was just that lack of consequence that had led Rey and her companion to eschew more notorious locations and send their archaic T-65 x-wings slingshotting around the moon’s lagrange point.

One of the consortium’s habitable areas hid a First Order supply facility–they just had to get proof. According to General Organa, Hapes, which was well within the Republic territories, had a fat purse and a Queen Mother famous for filtering credits into the accounts of ex-Imperials, but the glittering ballrooms and lush menageries of the capitol planet had proved frustratingly innocent to Resistence operatives. So there, among the sparkling threats and gem-studded back-stabbing of the Hapan Aristocracy, 653-Prime’s icy austerity became suspicious in and of itself.

Rey and Poe had broken into atmo on the dark side of 653-Prime, zoomed low over the pale crust of the southern pole until they were certain no scanners searched the area, and landed just shy of a cliff-edge, where wide-armed conifers relinquished territory to a jut of rock.

It would remain full-night on this moon for the next four cycles, so once they’d set up the last of their signal relays, the exhausted pilots made camp between their ships. Jittery from the flight, she’d taken first watch.

That had been a mistake. The thermoregulation bag had been warm when she slid into it–still clouded with body heat, and smelling like superheated metal and sweat. Like Poe. The internal mesh, however, had molded to longer bones and a broader back. It should have snapped close when she reset it, but the contractility fibers had slackened over time, making them less willing to tighten around a smaller form.

She’d managed to fall sleep anyway, but it hadn’t lasted.

When Rey opened her eyes, the stars were shivering. Specks of brilliance trembled in the endless pool of black sky, going hazy as she blinked up at them. She shifted, and chill air stole through the opening in her too-large thermoregulation bag.

Focus returned, sharp and cold. She ached with it–nose, knuckle, and bone–and even the thick pad beneath her didn’t quite manage to keep the ground’s chill from seeping into her shoulderblades.

The stars weren’t shivering. Rey was.

She sniffed, wiggling stiff fingers up to the throat of the thermoreg bag and giving the cords a good tug. It didn’t help much. The bag, she’d been told, was standard issue for a Rebel Pathfinder–winterproof, waterproof, and occasionally wildlife-proof–with a durable foam core surrounded by temperature-sensitive mesh and synth-wool lining. Which, of course, really meant that it was over three decades old, heavy with camouflage, and sized for a taller, broader humanoid than Rey.

It was her fault for agreeing to travel light.

She shivered and scrunched herself into the bag’s limp embrace, pressing her nose into the lining where it caught both the warmth of her own breath and the scent of the bag’s previous occupant.

Rey scowled and glanced at the sky behind her, where Commander Poe Dameron–both previous occupant and owner of the ancient Pathfinder bag–straddled the nose of his borrowed x-wing. He was elbow-deep in one of the forward panels, fiddling with what she could only assume was the turbolaser’s phased array. Probably reconnecting whatever disrupted channel was causing his shots to fire slightly starboard.

“I’m never listening to you about provisions again!” she called, shuddering as she reached out for her own quilted jacket. “This bag is useless.”

“Can’t you Jedi regulate your own core temperatures or something?” He called back. “I thought I heard you could do that.”

“Maybe Luke can, but he never mentioned it to me! Next time, I’m requisitioning something that isn’t twice my age.”

Poe snorted and affixed the panel to the ship’s bow. “Hey, it was good enough for my old man, and it was good enough for me.” He gave the panel a good rap with his fist and hauled himself back to the cockpit and down the ladder. His boots hit permafrost with a crunch of crystallized lichen.

Rey curled in her knees, twisting onto her side and away from Poe. She tucked her jacket around her neck and mouth, hoping it might help to shield the openings in the bag.

Poe’s boots crunched on the ground, coming closer. Rey’s senses reached out automatically, grazing his presence with her mind. He was passion and grit and durasteel certainty, a confidence without the vanity that might have made him arrogant. There was also warmth there, all its own. He had kind of heart that didn’t know how to power down or put up shields.

That last part, she didn’t understand. Of all the things to guard, one’s heart seemed like the most important.

Poe crouched next to her, tapped her forehead with one grease-smudged finger. “Sleep in the cockpit,” he said, jerking a thumb toward the x-wings. “It’s cramped, but insulated.”

She sat up, and though the bag came with her, the jacket fell clear. She shuddered, even as her fingers worked at the closures. “That’s a good–kriffing HELL!” she cursed, a knife of cold entering the opening and stabbing her in the side.

Poe chuckled, grabbed up her jacket, and helped her navigate her way out of his father’s sleeping bag. His breath came out in opaque plumes of steam, and for a moment she just stared at it, mesmerized by the phenomenon.

He slung her jacket around her shoulders, tugged it closed. The movement pulled her forward a step, and her hands shot out, keeping him at arm’s distance. His hands didn’t move from the lapels of her coat, and she could feel the heat of his wrists near her neck. Startled by her own reversion to Jakku-reflexes–keep people out, keep them away, no touching, no friends–she looked up into his face.

It was an attractive face. Heavy-lidded eyes and dark skin, a mobile smile. Three cycles of stubble darkened his jaw, sharpened his cheekbones. She shivered again.

Poe raised his eyebrows and gave her jacket a tug. “Your teeth are chattering, desert girl.” A jerk of his head toward the x-wing, and she blinked, nodded, and turned away from him. If anything, the night got colder.


	2. Pit and Snare

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Poe and Rey search for the secret facility and encounter a bit of trouble.

Poe waited until another three quarters of a watch had passed before rapping on the T-65’s canopy. The hatch hissed as it depressurized and sent a light fog of steam into the atmosphere. He jumped off the ladder and a moment later Rey emerged, flinching at the cold.

Poe’s lips tugged—he remembered those days well, when he’d been fresh off the face of Yavin 4 and even the temperature in the Republic barracks had felt like a cryo-chamber. His body had been too used to jungle heat and humidity. At least he’d had some meat on him, though. Rey was so thin, all sinew and narrow bones with none of the excess padding designed to keep a human warm.

That thinness could have looked fragile, but even shivering her way out of a pathfinder thermoreg bag, Rey had a whiplike ferocity, as if she wished her body’s needs would just get out of her way.

No. There was nothing fragile about Rey. She was a laser—bright energy focused into something slender and intense. He respected it. She made a tough operative and a good ally, even if she was green as spring on Endor.

He tossed a canister of chath to her, unsurprised when her hand shot out for it with preternatural speed. He’d gotten good at guessing which of his wing mates would catch the rations (Temmin, always; Iolo, next to never; Kare, when she knew it was coming) and liked the way the little snippet of observation helped him organize his pilots in his head. Who had reflex off the stick as well as on it? Who would get annoyed at a surprise and who enjoyed them?

Rey snapped the drink from the air, and shot a confused frown his way. She glanced at the canister. Chath was a spiced mix of bitter chaths-leaf extract and a gelatinous protein that, when heated, melted into something like cream. Poe had lived on the stuff in his training and early deployment years with the Republic fleet. It wasn’t quite a substitute for a solid meal, but it was efficient.

“Drink up,” he said. “I wanna get off this frostball.”

Rey cracked the canister’s seal, which set to steaming in her hands almost at once. She gave a grunt of pleasure—he assumed at the warmth—and tipped the contents into her mouth. She shuddered, either at the taste or the heat, but shimmied over the edge of the cockpit.

“You miss your droid already,” she accused. A pang of regret pulled his eyebrows low.

“Yeah,” he said. “I hate that he’s not backwards compatible with the T-65. If there’d been time to retrofit…”

“Stars. You’re secretly a mallowpuff.” Rey said, then chucked the pathfinder bag at his head. Poe caught it, still warm from the cockpit and her body heat, and bunched it under his arm.

“Tell that to the First Order,” he said with a grin.

“What, that your soft spot for an astromech is the biggest tactical weakness in the fleet?” Her boots hit the permafrost with a crunch. “I’d like to survive long enough to become a Jedi, thanks.”

Poe snorted. There was a tinge of the wicked in her grin—something clever and sharp that jabbed through the hard front. Completely unexpectedly, that playful hint of claws did something to him. Sharpened the compassion in his chest until it more closely resembled anger—though not at her. He remembered her hands, coming up defensively when he’d wrapped her in the jacket. There had been suspicion there, something reflexive that—if he were to guess—came from hard experience. It didn’t fit on her naturally, not like that sly grin did.

He let her have the bout, signaling her win with a mock-annoyed swat on the shoulder. “Gear up.”

 

 

Poe wouldn’t have made it as a Pathfinder. Though Kes Dameron had done his level bent to instill in his son a healthy respect for the muddy tactics of ground war, Poe hadn’t taken to it the way he had flying. To be fair, he hadn’t taken to anything the way he had flying, but of all his military skills, tracking was the shakiest.

Luckily, he didn’t need to track. He had a Jedi.

Rey led them through a stand of dark trees, along the spine of a ridge, and down into a gulley that cupped a curious, lingering fog. Poe didn’t ask how she knew where she was going. There were moments when she would stop, hands out as if balancing, and her gaze went distant. In those moments, all he could do was watch and try to divine from her expression some hint of what she felt in the Force.

He’d always wondered what it might be like, to have power like that—to not only sense the energy in things, but to have the ability to manipulate that energy, to affect something without having to be close to it.

It would have been damn useful during the interrogation.

He shook off the thought. Memories of that interrogation blinked into his mind occasionally, in quiet moments or unexpected moments, but less frequently now than they had before.

“For the dark side of the moon, it’s really bright,” Rey said, pulling him back to the tree-lined gulley they’d paused under.

“Yeah, Hapes is famous for being extra sparkly,” he said, shifting the weight of the supply pack on his shoulders. “All those hundreds of stars all clustered together, you’re gonna get some intense light, even at night. Hard to get away from it.”

Rey nodded, squinting up into the trees. “There’s something…someone…nearby—I just don’t know where exactly. If it’s this bright…” she trailed off, but Poe understood her meaning.

“More light means more shadows to hide in,” he said. “If there’s a facility nearby, they’re gonna have guards. If it’s First Order, they’re probably just paranoid enough to have scouts too. We should get to higher ground—maybe see them before they see us.”

He reached under his coat and unsnapped the guard on his holster, hoping he wouldn’t have to use it. Nothing drew stormtroopers like the sizzle of blaster fire on a cold, dark night.

They clambered out of the gulley and up the ridge, keeping low. Rey’s breath was coming faster, plumes of steam pulsing from her mouth as she halted again. Poe leaned back against rough bark and scanned the forest. Nothing that he could see, though that didn’t mean there was nothing. He pulled out a set of quadroculars and scanned for heat signatures.

“Nothing,” he said. “No scouts or—”

Rey grabbed his jacket. He had only a second to be startled before she hooked his ankle and shoved, sending him crashing down. A split second later, he knew it had been deliberate. She was coming down with him. Above, the tree he’d been leaning on splintered, the bark exploding outward, kicked up by something that was decidedly more solid than blaster fire.

He hit ground an instant before Rey, and shoved onto his elbow. His blaster was in his hand, barrel seeking a target before he’d even thought about it. But there was no smell of ozone, no lingering sense of the bolt’s path like there would have been with a blaster.

“What were you saying about no scouts?” Rey demanded, snatching the quadroculars and twisting them to a different setting. “Blast—it’s all tech. There’s some sort of security system in place, over there. Might be a droid or-”

Poe fired three shots into the woods where she pointed. A moment later, something sparked, flickered, and began to smoke. He turned to Rey. She looked at him.

“So we’re close, then.”

Rey quirked an eyebrow and didn’t dignify him with the obvious answer. Together, they pushed to their feet and dusted off, both crouching a bit as Rey scanned with the quadroculars for more security droids and Poe inspected the damage to the tree.

“There’s something in there. Looks like…metal. They shooting metal at us? What millennium is this?”

“The millennium wouldn’t have mattered if it hit you. Same with rocks,” Rey said. “Or pits with spikes.”

“Or forest snares,” Poe said, thinking of his father yet again. “Apparently they were used to great effect during the operation on Endor.”

Rey lowered the quadroculars, then handed them back to Poe. She pointed along the ridge to where it dropped off. “I think it’s that way—there’s an electronic signature.”

Poe looked through the lenses, reading the data overlay. “Yeah. Probably a service hatch so whoever ran maintenance on that droid.” He shoved the quadroculars back into his coat. “Let’s see who’s home.”

**Author's Note:**

> First posted on Tumblr under the username orangeflightsuit dot tumblr dot com. It's my first foray into Star Wars fanfiction since my YJK-reading days, and despite the fact that much of my knowledge is now relegated to Legends, I'm hoping the inclusion of things like Hapes doesn't cause too much confusion.
> 
> Feedback appreciated. <3


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